La Vie Quotidien

In response to calls for more information on my personal experiences in Beijing, and less tourist-guide fodder, here is a day in the life of James, Beijing Style:

7:30: Wake up for breakfast. It ends at 8:30, and if I want to get a shower in I have to up myself at this ungodly hour.

9:30 Review Chinese vocab which I will promptly forget as soon as I step out the door. This language is pretty hard....

10-12:00, first class. This is my primary course, which introduces grammatical terms and vocab etc. We've had two teachers so far, I guess our collective beauty blinded the original prof.

12-1:00 Lunch at one of Beida's cafeterias. There are a lot of them, but they all seem to be in the same little alley. If you can make it to the caf, get through the crowds, get your food and eat it before Tutorial starts, you know its an A day.

1-3:00 Tutorial. My T.A., Li Laoshi, is 53 pounds of steely resolve. Also, she has an affinity for Maoist anthems. Solid dame.

3-6:00 any number of activities, ranging from ping pong (ok I only played it once, but I'm not half bad: Thanks Camp Belknap) to hanging out by the lake to exploring the city with friends. This is the Hutong next to our hotel. This part reminds me of the Wild West park at Disney World.

6-8:00 Since we dont have meals provided except breakfast, and since we don't have kitchens, I eat out pretty much every day. Luckily, this rarely puts me back more than 8 dollars US. Here we see Josh and Jill enjoying 40-cent-US-litres (yes litres) of beer. Beer is very popular here, introduced by the Germans in the city of Qingdao. Apparently it takes the edge off of abject poverty.

Weeknights: The best thing about this program is, though it's intensive, it's not particularly hard to keep up with the work when you only have one class. This makes travel really easy, because all you have to do is tell your teacher and take the dictations early. That said, weeknights are pretty exclusively review of vocab. The most difficult thing about Chinese is without a doubt the writing, and unless you use it, you lose it.

Weekend Evenings: When we dont have a scheduled trip planned, we often go out on weekends to local bars etc. to hang out. These photos show a weekend where we went to D-22, a very Montreal-esque rock venue where we saw four very amazing local bands. One had a girl who might have been 15 y.o. and 5 feet flat playing the drums like Sheila E. I wouldn't say Beijing is a party city, certainly it doesn't have the joie de vivre of Montreal. It does, however, have it's persistent pockets of expat-inspired, Chinese-youth-approved coolness that many of us on the trip have come to appreciate.






So there it is, a day in my life, more or less. More to come soon, keep tuned in.